I'm only three hours away from where Branny operates.  If the thing suddenly went South, I can drive down there and punch him in the throat.  So I have no worries about it being a Ponzi, at all.  You seem to be the only person in here being dumb and having concerns.  And I'm sure you're not an investor.  All the information about what is going on and has been happening is in this thread.  Branny answers PM's and posts on here with very clear information even to trolls like you.

And at no point did I say we made profit.  I said Branny distributes income from the houses.  It's all very clear.  It's a growing business.  You don't always make dividends on stock purchases.  Sometimes you wait for the growth to end before dividends are distributed.  You either do your homework when you invest, or you don't.  Some of us do.

Go away fly... 

You seem confused or purposely trying to poke holes in something that is and has been pretty clear to everyone involved, except you.  Or you are fine with it, and are trying to produce FUD to get a lower share price.

The IPO was setup in rounds.  After the first round, Branny had another one.  Was all explained in detail, everyone knew about it.  There were other planned rounds if I'm not mistaken.  I think a total of 5?  This is not unusual, many securities are structured the same way.  Branny owns those shares, he can sell them if he wants to.  Just like you can if you owned any.

What Branny is trying to do isn't Ponzi.  He isn't taking the investments people make and then paying the people with those same dollars.  He's buying houses and paying investors a percentage of the income from the renters.  Pretty clear.  Would be the worst Ponzi ever considering the gains we're seeing.

The second offering, and now loan, is being done to gain enough properties to have leverage.  The fund has enough physical assets to cover the loans if anything goes sour.  He just sells off some property and we're straight.

Otherwise, it would take years to build up enough income with the few properties that he currently has, to purchase more properties.   However, once he has the loan and purchases the new properties, even with the loan payments, the income would then be high enough to allow continued expansion and investment in new properties, and thus the business grows.

This has been one of the most transparent and well communicated investments I've been involved in, and I've been in involved with dozens of them.  If you're not here to invest, go complain in one of the hardware manufacturing threads.  There is plenty to complain about there.

Is the company incorporated?  And is it incorporated in China?  I remember hearing that the owner is in England.  Regardless of where the company operates, you need to know where it is incorporated.  That would be the country to sue in.  If they are not incorporated and are a partnership or soul owner business, then you would go after the owner directly.

You can sue them in the United States.  You would win, because they won't show up.  Then you file paperwork to get an embargo done on their (and their owner's) ability to ever do business in the United States again.  This is how Commodore International (Commodore 64 computer) went out of business.  They lost a private lawsuit, the judge put an embargo on their ability to bring hardware into the country, and they went out of business.  (After years of mismanagement prevented them from being able to afford to pay the judgement)

Miners will mine the coin if the coin is profitable.

The coin will only be profitable if people buy the coin.  Not mine it.  Mining the coin does not make it profitable.  Mining the coin dilutes the value causing it to be worthless.

I was holding the coin's value at 100 Satoshi.  I dropped my buywalls to 50 Satoshi because I got tired of subsidizing half a million coins a day that miners were dumping on the market. 

When the update happens that restricts the amount of coins being mined, I (and other investors) can buy the coins and raise the value.

As the value rises, you and other miners will mine it again because it will be profitable.

Volume of coins mined has nothing to do with your profits.  Only the value of the coin itself. 

Now, you need more consumer facing features to really enable this coin to take off.  You can't just restrict supply and expect people to invest.  People will invest if this coin is innovative and provides features that other coins do not have, and that consumers and businesses are going to want to use.  That way they adopt the coin for reasons of commerce, and that causes the coin's value to grow beyond speculation.

Growth increases the mining reward, increases volume, and your mining profit.

Having a coin that is developed to attract miners only is a waste of time.  Miners will mine the coin if it is profitable. That's all they care about.  Making the coin profitable is the developer's job to make it so the coin is worthwhile to investors and consumer facing adopters.

The other two power the time machine so you can get a lower difficulty rate...

I totally think it's a ponzi or some terrible scheme.  But to play devil's advocate, they could be merge mining other coins and taking the profits from those and not Bitcoin.  Providing all Bitcoin profits to the end user.  They could also realistically acquire bulk hardware purchases cheaper than what we see as retail pricing.  So there may be more breathing room in there.


It's quite possible that PBMining is buying coins from some other dubious source and then distributing them.  For instance, say an American hacker has hundreds of thousands of coins that he hacked or stole.  He can't put these through an exchange because they would get reported to FinCen.  So he has to find another source to give him cash for the coins.  PBMining works out a deal with him for cash for coins at a reduced rate.  PBMining then mixes small batches of coins and distributes to end users.  This isn't a Ponzi, but it does rely on someone selling them coins at a discounted rate.

Another possibility is that PBMining is reselling a Chinese mining outfit's coins.  Right now the banks in China won't allow them to really deal in Bitcoin without going through a lot of work-arounds.  PBMining could work out a simple cash deal, give the mining outfit cash for discounted coins.  But do it in such a way that no red flags are going to go off at the bank.  (Which would happen if they just came out and offered the same deal to the public to get a better rate.)  

Nobody really knows what the game is.  We're assuming it's a ponzi, but it could be anything really.  What it doesn't seem to be is 1ph of mining going on in Canada.  

They are not going to use the same inefficient hardware to mine for the next 5 years.

If they bought Antminers, they watts per gh are what?  1.5watt to the gh?

If they ordered SP30's from Spondoolie, the watts per gh becomes 0.5watt per gh or less.

If BFL ever ships, their wattage is even less.  If they downclock, the wattage is even less than that.


Plus, you have to look at top end vs bottom.  If a thousand miners bought in at 1gh.  They can buy a single Dragon Miner to mine that at 1.1watt to the gh now.  Then, later, they can put all 1000 people on an Imperial Monarch and pay 0.45 watts per gh.


The power argument over 5 years is stupid.  Due to the difficulty rise, the folks mining after the first year are only going to earn a few Satoshi.  They can buy a modern miner at that time, and pay those people for the entire rest of the four years on that one miner's profits in the first couple months.

They aren't going to just have a miner running and pay more for power than it profits.  That's insane.


I'm critical of these guys as much as anyone, but this power argument is stupid.

Is there a spreadsheet of buyers for this group buy?  I want to be sure I'm actually on it.

As for the question, I agree that the ROI guarantee is worthless.  You either deliver, or you'll go out of business. Nobody believes that if mining becomes unprofitable you'll be able to reimburse the miners what they lost on the venture.  So don't make promises that you might not be able to keep.  Stay honest and in reality.  People in this space should know the risks or not invest.

You probably will just crash and burn running a mining farm, because the margins are too low.  You can't support everything you need and a salary to pay yourself and turn around and be profitable.  Of course this depends on difficult/bitcoin price, but based on history almost nobody is successful with it.  At least in terms of showing profits.  Some farms continue to reinvest and grow, but their coin holders aren't driving sports cars and buying mansions.



A smart investment fund that someone with free-time should create is a "Vulture Venture Cap" that creates a sizable amount of cash in holdings and then waits for a failed hardware company to go belly up.  Then the VVC buys the company's assets at pennies on the dollar and hashes with their technology.

Take Hash Fast as an example.  Probably could have walked in and bought boards and chips for a very low price and gotten them up and mining profitably in no time. 

The fall out of failed mining operations is just going to continue.  There are a lot of joints that poured a bunch of start up funds in and then bit off more than they can chew to get their money back out.  A VVC would just need to negotiate price and absorb the failed business's hardware that can be made profitable based on price.



I'd invest in that business.   Because that would be a smart business.  It takes on no risk.  Has a known investment strategy.  Can remain dormant while market forces play out, and then strikes at opportune times for its best interest only.  You'd need legal help.  Find a lawyer that can participate in judgements and legal auctions of assets, plus liquidations.  Then do a lot of digging to talk to the failed or failing businesses on getting them to sell to you their hardware for cheap.

Kind of like flipping houses, but in the Bitcoin universe of mining operations.  If done properly, it can make a lot of people very rich.

That is pie-in-the-sky speculation.  The margins on mining right now are very narrow.  The last thing someone is going to do is pay a middle-man like them to manage the setup.  The numbers won't work.  Better to just invest in the coin and watch it rise.

The best thing out of this whole Black Arrow debacle is being introduced to Miner Source.  They are a good company.

Can someone explain what this means please...

"Don’t parallel connected different DC input from different PSU into the same Hashing board."

Or if already discussed just tell me and I'll look back through the posts for it. 

Thanks

Grnbrg took a bunch of pictures and posted them up pages back when he went to visit with him.  So there are miners.

Everything else you say is valid.

Haven't you gotten them yet?  Are they online?

I have 4 contracts.  Paid for them, not sure if I'm on a spreadsheet or anything.  I have the emails to you, etc saved though. 

I think mining Scrypt isn't a good way to go.  I think it's better to stick with the Neptune.  I think there is reason to believe that Scrypt is going to get drained rapidly when all the scrypt miners start cashing in and the difficulty soars.  Then it won't be worth mining.  But like everything with future predictions, it's all a guess. 

At least with the Neptunes, they are mining NOW (Or sooner anyway) and we have a known quantity.  The Titan may suffer delays or also be under whelming.  So it's all a risk.  I vote to just stick it out with Bitcoin but I won't cry if we go to the Titan. 

Example...

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=656461.msg7552456#msg7552456

Whatever man.  Antminers are 350 watts for like 180gh.  And a SP30 is going to be  6th for 2600 watts.  Sort of a huge difference there.  The difficulty makes it so that the guy earning .0000001 every week can be pooled together with thousands of other old contracts and put on a single miner that is modern and earning more than they need.

I don't see how you don't understand this.  I don't run my 333mhz block erupter right now, because it earns something like .00000001 coin a day or something terrible.  I can earn more than what 500 of them make by using 1 antminer.  They will do the same thing.

True, but I think we've provided more than enough warning and reasons why in this forum post.  Anyone who is still in it deserves what they get.

Honestly, I'm glad it's a Ponzi.  Think about it.  That is 800th that isn't adding to the difficulty. 

You keep going to the 5 years calculation.  Miners continue to get more efficient and faster.  If they started with Antminers running 350 watts at 200gh (Let's assume they overclock) and then they start getting Spondoolie hardware at 6th for 2600 watts.  They can move a whole bunch of contracts to the 6th and shut down the Antminers and sell them off for profit.

It's not like they are going to run an Antminer for the next five years and pay more money in power than it earns in mining.

At some point, you don't even mine for those people if it doesn't make fiscal sense to do so.  You scrape up a dollar and pass out the change without even bothering to mine.

Well, according to their website SaskPower which I guess is the power company in Saskatechewan is 11cents per kwh.  Which I'm assuming that is in Canadian money, so it's probably close to 10 cents in USD.  If they are far enough North they can also save a bundle on cooling costs. 

I'm not making excuses.  I think you got screwed.  Oh well.  I'm still waiting on an X3 and I feel screwed too.  So you're just another member of the bend over and take it club.  Welcome!  There are snacks in the main hall.  We'll be having a square-dancing competition tonight.  The royal reaming should commence tomorrow after the update.